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ALICE in BLUNDER LAND a Review of Galileo’S Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science by Alice Dreger

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ALICE in BLUNDER LAND a Review of Galileo’S Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science by Alice Dreger Evolution, Mind and Behaviour 13(2015), 47–51 DOI: 10.1556/2050.2015.0004 ALICE IN BLUNDER LAND A review of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science by Alice Dreger. New York, NY: Penguin (2015), 352 pages. ROBERT KING School of Applied Psychology UCC “‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, very gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’” Alice Dreger is a bioethicist employed, until very recently, at Northwestern University. The fact that she felt compelled to resign over a point of ethical principle just underscores the points she makes in the book. She has long been a champion of two things. First: that driving spirit in science – the Galilean one – that sees truth as a spiritual goal and raises a middle finger to those that dis- agree. Second: The just treatment of those typically marginalized and ignored because their needs are inconvenient to wider society (Dreger, 1998). Galileo’s Middle Finger (Dreger, 2015) is therefore a series of gripping de- tective stories exploring the various blunders of scientists who did not see what was coming when they published, of pusillanimous bureaucrats terrified of their University brand being tarnished, of the politically over-zealous, and the per- sonally affronted. Dreger also fearlessly takes on some outright frauds. She is conspicuously thorough and fair-minded throughout a book that, in places, reads like a thriller. It should be required reading on any science course and will serve partly as a survival manual to those who publish in contentious fields. “If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.” Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out that in a democracy we get the leaders we deserve. This is because we call it a gaffe when a politician tells the truth. Yet, at the same time, everyone decries our juke-box politicians. Some journal- ist solemnly presses the button marked “issue A” and the politician, equally sol- emnly, plays the bland recording of whatever the PR-honed party line is on Is- sue A. Attempts to press the politician further just produce stony-faced repeats of a message honed and crafted by PR and management-speak gurus to be as inoffensive and open to ambiguity as possible. All the while, of course, the real work goes on in the background away from public scrutiny. This is bad for poli- tics and it is equally bad when this becomes the model for the public under- standing of science. © 2015 The Author(s) 48 ROBERT KING We are in grave danger of producing juke-box scientists to partner our juke-box politicians. This has always been a risk – for reasons I will go into in a minute – but lately the danger has become magnified by the rise of social media and the speed with which ignorance and outrage can spread. This has recreated the gleeful, posturing, sanctimonious hypocrisies of the medieval village mob tying some unfortunate to a ducking stool and laughing at their humiliation and fear. “If you don’t know where you are going any road can take you there” If Dreger is right then this process of outrage, and fear of outrage, is going to do the same to scientists as it has to politicians – and we will have deserved everything we get as a result. She documents a series of conflicts between scien- tists and the outraged in exhaustive detail in a writing style that is by turns witty, erudite, and impassioned. The cliché would be to say that this is a book you can’t put down. And that is true. But not only could I not put it down, at various points I became enraged enough to want to pick it up, hold it high, and hit certain people with it. My emotional reactions to it were so obvious that I made a new friend beside me on my flight to Helsinki who wondered what the hell the book I was reading was all about and could not resist introducing her- self to ask me. A lot of the book reads like a series of breathless detective stories with Dreger uncovering a mix of ignorance, prejudice, and mule-headedness through to malfeasance and out and out fraud. Given that some of these stories have a tension that runs through them that would be spoiled by too much revelation, I will not document them in detail, but instead focus on some of the themes that arise from them. “Six impossible things before breakfast” The communication of science to the wider public has always been a tricky issue and this is because science is not common sense (Wolpert, 1994). Com- mon sense was honed over millions of years to be a bunch of useful tools for understanding things like the ethics of small scale societies, the velocities of human-sized objects and the pragmatic taxonomies of local organisms. Com- mon sense is about the human sized and a truly scientific understanding dra- matically alters the scale at both extremes of tiny and vast. Common sense relies on intuition, authority, and tradition and these are all things that are worse than useless for getting at the way the world works underneath the set of evolved ad- aptations that common-sense thinks of as reality. This is obviously true when one reflects that we have had smart humans for tens of thousands of years but only anything that could be called science for a few hundred of those. Science is recent and most of it is wildly counter-intuitive. This, incidentally, is one reason EMB (2015) ALICE IN BLUNDER LAND 49 why scientists speaking with their specialist confidence, but outside of their own discipline, can often make egregious blunders. “It is better to be feared than loved.” All of this means that it is almost inevitable that if you are doing science about areas that people care about then you are going to annoy people. It also means that the people who are typically good at science have a set of attitudes to things like authority, intuition, and tradition that are going to annoy people still further. But, it is when science intersects with human nature that offence is most likely to be taken and nothing gets to the heart of human nature faster or deeper than sex. Sex research has even united the house of representatives in the only unanimous decision in its history – to condemn a paper that dared to show evidence that some victims of sexual abuse could make recoveries (Zucker, 2002). “Curiouser and curiouser!” Many of the characters in Galileo’s Middle Finger will be well known to evolutionary scholars and people who go to conferences connected to this field, sex research, or the intersection between medicine and other disciplines. But sex is perhaps the major theme that runs through all of the scandals that Dreger in- vestigates. Whether it’s the forcing of intersex individuals into socially com- fortable (but individually painful) categories, the attempted public destruction of the career of renowned sex researcher Mike Bailey over his book The Man Who Would be Queen, or the excoriation of Thornhill and Palmer’s attempt to shed biological light on the phenomenon of rape – sex is the thread joining all of these. Even the attempted vilification of Napoleon Chagnon on utterly gro- tesque trumped-up charges of genocide of the Yanomamo had a sexual theme. It was his finding that reproductive success (rather than property) drove violence in a horticultural society that so incensed some members of the AAA that some were willing to allow him to be attacked on the flimsiest of evidence. While there were prominent anthropologists like Margaret Mead who resisted calls for a de facto book burning of Chagnon’s work, far too many in anthropology and related disciplines were willing to stand by and see Chagnon’s reputation sul- lied. Fortunately all the charges against him were thoroughly debunked (Hagen, Price, & Tooby, 2001) but at what cost to Chagnon personally and to the reputa- tion of the field? “Off with their heads!” In all cases Dreger documents the attacks are viciously personal. In all cases an ideology and/or a sense of personal identity were threatened. Anyone used to social media sees issues of so-called identity politics daily. However, if EMB (2015) 50 ROBERT KING all public debate, let alone scientific exchange, is not to be reduced to trivial ex- changes of “well he would say that, wouldn’t he” then all of us have to resist the temptation to play the ball and not the man. “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” Dreger understands all about the medical concept of risk factors and pro- vides some helpful examples of these for those who might get political backlash for their work. She warns that any study of human behaviour is risky with spe- cial notice being applied to areas of sex, gender, or race. If your work does not allow you be fitted into a simple political camp then you are likely to get at- tacked by both of them. If you did not take the precaution of being from some sort of oppressed minority then this is a further danger. Being a good writer is risky – because then your books will actually be read by those who might be- come offended. Most interestingly she identifies the Galilean personality as the biggest risk factor of all. This is the personality that behaves as if the truth mat- ters more than anything else.
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